15 Chinese Ad Campaigns That Make Abortion Procedures Look Glamorous

From bus stops to magazines, advertisements of clinics promising women a ‘fast’ and ‘painless’ abortion are commonplace in China, sending out the message that terminating a pregnancy is as easy as getting your nails done.

When it is rush hour in Beijing, street marketers often pass out flyers to people around busy subway stations. Most of the time, these pamphlets promote a new neighborhood restaurant or an upcoming real estate project.

Often, however, they promote abortion procedures at a local clinic. The pink and shiny ad campaigns advertise their abortion procedures in similar ways as beauty parlors or nail salons would market their services – a phenomenon which would be unimaginable in many western countries.

China’s “Abortion Culture”

The legal and moral obstacles to abortion that are ubiquitous in the US or elsewhere are much less pervasive in China, a country that has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, approximately 13 million abortions are carried out in China every year (Yang 2015).

The actual number, however, is probably much higher. The official figures do not include the abortion statistics from private clinics, nor the estimated 10 million induced abortions per year through medicine (Xinhua 2014), let alone the numbers of sex-selective abortions– a practice that has officially been illegal since 2004.

There are various reasons why China’s abortion rates are so high. In “Women’s Health and Abortion Culture in China: Policy, Perception, and Practice,” author Naomi Bouchard describes how the “visible abortion culture” in China today is an (indirect) consequence of the 1979 Family Planning Policy (better known as the One-Child Policy), family pressure, traditional values, and insufficient sexual education (2014, 2).

Especially the last dimension leads to unplanned pregnancies, notably in young women. According to official data, 4% of China’s unmarried female teenagers experience an unplanned pregnancy, with 90% of them ending in abortion (Pan 2013). According to a doctor quoted in Bouchard’s study, it is both lack of knowledge as well as embarrassment about buying condoms or other contraceptives that contributes to unplanned pregnancies in young women (2014, 17).

Thriving Abortion Industry

Besides the social factors that play an important role in China’s “abortion culture,” there is also the legal aspect that makes abortion procedures relatively common in the PRC. Unlike many other countries, China allows abortion for any reason (Theodorou & Sandstrom 2015).

The upper limit for legal abortions depends on circumstances. According to Hemmenki et al (2005), China’s 1979 abortion law sets 28 weeks of gestation as the upper limit for pregnancy termination, although some provinces “have made their own laws stipulating the place and performer of the abortion.” Other literature suggests that there is no limit fixed by statue (Jackson 2013, 423), and that abortions can take place up to the ninth month if the pregnancy is affected by severe anomalies (Deng et al 2015, 312).

All the aforementioned components have led to the existence of a thriving medical industry focused on abortion procedures in China, which comes with a strong commercial marketing of these procedures – advertised anywhere from bus stops to magazines and through flyers.

Scroll through the slider below (move arrows below) to see a selection of 15 advertisements for abortion procedures. The majority of these ads use the color pink and show young women either by themselves or with their partner. Besides addressing the women, their slogans also often speak to their partners (“If you love her, give her the best“).

This ad by Jinzhong Friendship Hospital offers the service of “Korea JRS’s dream abortions,” persuading people to choose for their services with the underline: “You love her, give her the best.” The main slogan says: “Bye bye pain, hello happiness.”

If there is a market for the abortion procedures so attractively advertised by these clinics, then what's the harm in them?

The Negative Impact of Glamorous Abortion Ads

Over recent years, Chinese media have increasingly paid attention to China's booming abortion industry and the danger it entails. Chinese news outlet SDNews recently reported that some of these clinics perform unsafe and potentially hazardous procedures in order to deliver the 'fast' and 'cheap' abortions they promise in their ads; they skip pre-abortion gynecological examinations, hire low-level doctors or even nurses to perform surgery, and do not work with disposable surgical materials.

Another potential negative effect of the alluring advertisements, as described by state media outlet Xinhua News, is that they mislead young people into thinking an abortion is a simple and ‘normal’ procedure. Director of the Gynecological Department of Hebei’s Academic Hospital, Meng Yali, states that a lack in sex education and the excess of ‘easy abortion’ advertisement make young girls more susceptible to teen pregnancy: "We really see a trend in abortions amongst unmarried teen girls," Meng says: "It even involves girls that are barely 14" (Xinhua 2014).

The fact that it is more common to see a public display of advertisements relating to abortions than ads for contraception also does not help in promoting public awareness on preventing unwanted pregnancy. China has known a long-standing ban on condom advertisements.

This is something that was recently criticized by netizens on Sina Weibo, who said: "We see plenty of TV commercials about 'painless abortions,' and yet not a single commercial for condoms. Televisions stations will allow the first, yet prohibit the latter!"

One office worker on Weibo points out that among all the advertisements in his building's elevator, besides used cars, plastic surgery, and food products, the 'painless abortions ad' are most dominant. "It's just really awkward," he says.

"Condoms are good things; they don't just prevent pregnancy, they also prevent STD's. Young people, especially girls, have to learn how to protect themselves," one person commented.

Another netizen points out a crucial problem amidst the abundance of 'painless abortion' ads: "These abortion advertisements are everywhere, yet sexual education is nowhere to be seen."

As long as there are more abortion ads on public display than there are ads for contraception, and as long as sexual education continues to be a controversial subject in classrooms, the 'painless' and 'dreamlike' abortion ads are likely to remain commonplace in modern-day China.

Pan Ying. 2013. "中国青少年女性4％曾意外怀孕 青少年性教育亟待加强 [4% of Chinese young woman have experienced an unplanned pregnant; sex education for young people urgently needs to be reinforced.]" CRI, June 11. http://gb.cri.cn/42071/2013/07/11/5892s4179054.htm [20.8.14].

Manya Koetse is the editor-in-chief of www.whatsonweibo.com. She is a writer and consultant (Sinologist, MPhil) on social trends in China, with a focus on social media and digital developments, popular culture, and gender issues. Contact at manya@whatsonweibo.com, or follow on Twitter.

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2 Comments

2 Comments

Will Kemp

December 13, 2017 at 8:17 am

Generally a wonderful article but the section where you say that condom ads are banned in China isn’t accurate. I live in Chongqing and I can’t move for Durex Air ads at the moment. There’s a video ad in the lift of my apartment building and its being shown before films in the cinema too. Perhaps there was a change in the law?

I know this article was posted quite a while ago, but I feel like the biggest issue you didn’t hit on is that for many of the unmarried women who get pregnant, there’s really not a choice.

If they’re unmarried, and have a kid, that child will never have a Hukou, and is pretty much considered (in the eyes of the government) to be an underworld baby. The child won’t be able to attend school or get any medical, and without initially having a hukou, they can’t do anything to change hukous later on, so pretty much fucked for life.

This Is the Weibo Post with the Most Comments Ever (Well, Almost)

It’s all about the money? When billionaire Wang Sicong announced he would be giving away more than $160,000 to Weibo users, his post generated over 63 million reactions.

The victory of Chinese esports team Invictus Gaming (IG) was one of the biggest trending topics on Weibo the past week, with the joy among China’s younger generations over winning the League of Legends World Championship being noticeable both online and offline.

Cheering crowds for the Chinese team (Sinanews).

Amid cheering crowds on campuses and celebratory posts flooding WeChat and Weibo, there was one post that especially stood out this week: that of Chinese billionaire Wang Sicong (王思聪).

Wang Sicong, who now has over 41 million followers on his Weibo account (@王思聪), is one of China’s most famous fu’erdai (富二代), the term that refers to the ‘second generation rich’: the children of the nouveau riche in China. Wang is the son of Chinese tycoon Wang Jianlin (王健林), who is known as one of the richest persons in Asia.

On November 6, three days after Invictus Gaming’s League of Legends victory, Wang posted on Weibo:

“To celebrate IG’s championship, I will do a championship month event; this month, I will draw prizes in four waves. Today is the first one, and out of everyone who comments/likes/forwards this post, I’ll draw 113 people (to celebrate the awesome day of 11.3 [when IG won]), and those people will all get 10,000 yuan [±$1437] in cash.

At the time of writing, the post has received more than 24 million shares, over 20 million comments, and 19 million likes.

On November 11, Single’s Day, Wang announced that the winners had been picked through Weibo’s lottery picking system (@微博抽奖平台).

Besides that it is likely that Wang’s post is a collaboration with Sina Weibo, Wang has more reasons for this noteworthy prize drawing. Wang himself is the founder of the current ‘Invictus Gaming’ team; he acquired the top Chinese gaming club ‘Catastrophic Cruel Memories’ in 2011, in order to promote professional esports in China.

The ‘lottery’ has also boosted Wang’s online fanbase, which grew by two million fans within several days time.

Biggest Posts on Weibo

Although it is very rare to see this big of a number of reactions and shares for one post on Weibo, Wang’s post officially is not the ‘number one’ popular post of all times on Weibo.

In 2016, Guinness World Records actually announced a world record for “Most comments on a Weibo™ post.” The record holder is the Chinese singer and actor Lu Han (鹿晗), whose 2012 post about his favourite soccer team, Manchester United, had received 100,899,012 comments.

What is a bit misleading about the record, however, is that the comments were accumulated over a period of multiple years.

To put into perspective how popular Wang Sicong’s recent post really is, we will line up some examples of posts that became booming on Weibo.

Last year, one post by Lu Han in which he announced his new relationship actually led to a temporary breakdown of Weibo’s servers. A day later, the post had received 2,4 million comments – far less than the amount of comments Wang’s post received over the past week.

Wang Baoqiang announced on Weibo that his wife betrayed him and that he was getting a divorce.

Another noteworthy post that made social media blow up was that of Chinese actor Wang Baoqiang, who announced on Weibo in 2016 that he was divorcing his wife and firing his agent because of their secret love affair. That post received over 1,5 million comments within 24 hours.

The apology post by Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, who was caught up in what has become the most controversial tax scandal of 2018, had its comments disabled, but received over 340,000 shares and some two million likes.

According to Time, the most popular post on Twitter of 2017 was that of Carter Wilkinson who asked American fast food chain Wendy’s “how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”, which received a reply from the chain saying “18 million.”

By now, Carter’s tweet “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS” has received more than 3,5 million retweets. (Although he did not make it to 18 million, he still got his year-long supply of nuggets.)

It is clear that by accumulating more than 60 million reactions (shares, comments, likes) within seven days, Wang Sicong’s post is now among the top scoring posts of all time on Weibo. (Do you know of other posts that set Weibo booming, please let us know in the comment section below – we might make a list later).

There’s been much talk about China’s ‘credit score’ recently, with many media conflating the country’s Social Credit System with the commercial Sesame Credit programme. In this article, we will explain the latter: what is Sesame Credit and what can users do with their high score?

Note: for more about the Social Credit System and differences in its media coverage in China and the West, please see this article.

With all the talks about China’s nascent Social Credit system and commercial social credit programmes, it is becoming clear that Chinese netizens are entering a ‘credit lifestyle’ (信用生活).

“All Chinese citizens now have a score,” is an idea that has popped up in many foreign media over the past years, often conflating it with China’s nascent ‘Social Credit System.’ To read more about the Social Credit System see our articles about this here or here. In this article, we will solely focus on Sesame Credit.

On Weibo, the official Sesame Credit account (@芝麻信用), which has over 240,840 followers, often announces new ways for people to profit from their (high) Sesame Credit score.

What’s on Weibo explores and lists five different ways in which a high Sesame Credit score can be used in China today. But first – what actually is Sesame Credit?

About Sesame Credit

Sesame Credit (Zhīma xìnyòng 芝麻信用) was launched on January 28, 2015, by Alibaba’s Ant Financial, after it had received permission by the PBOC (People’s Bank of China) to be one of the eight Chinese companies to experiment with personal credit reporting.

According to the Sesame Credit company, its major goal is to make credit more widely available to consumers and small business owners, and to “enable credit providers to make holistic and accurate decisions,” while also “empowering merchants to provide more credit-related services.”

Image via http://www.twoeggz.com.

Because Sesame Credit is part of Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group family (Ant Financial is an affiliate of the Chinese Alibaba Group), Sesame Credit has an enormous amount of data at its disposal, from e-commerce sites to finance products. China’s biggest shopping websites Taobao and Tmall belong to Alibaba’s vast online ecosystem, as does payment app Alipay.

It is not mandatory for users to opt into Sesame Credit. Some have compared the system to a loyalty program, although it is a bit more than that. Since 2015, for example, Sesame Credit also cooperates with the popular online dating service company Baihe.com (百合网), so that people can link their dating profile to their credit score. Sesame Credit already had 520 million users as of 2017.

Since its launch, various foreign media have written about Sesame Credit as an ‘Orwellian system.’ Among others, one of the reasons for this, is that Sesame Credit incorporates a publicly available ‘blacklist’ into its scoring process. The ‘blacklist’ is a Chinese courts’ list with the names of people that have an effective court justice against them; inclusion on this list can make users’ existing Sesame Credit drop dramatically, which would make people miss out on all perks of having a high Sesame Score.

Earlier in 2018, Alibaba, along with the seven other private credit programmes that were allowed to run their trial in 2015, become shareholders and active contributors to a new unified platform that has access to an enormous number of personal credit data. At the so-called ‘trust alliance’ (信联) Baihang Credit (百行征信), state level and commercial organizations join forces in further developing China’s credit systems.

About the Score

Within the Sesame Credit programme, the lowest score one can get is 350. The highest is 950. This score is based on users’ behavior across various platforms. A score of 550 to 600 is an intermediate/normal score. 600-650 is considered a ‘good’ score. Those in the 700-950 range are exceptionally high in score.

For those who first opt-in to Sesame Credit, and who have not had any violations, 600 is usually the score to receive.

Sesame Credit example scores explained, from 385 being in the low range to 731 being in the ‘good’ range.

• (35%) general credit history: past payment history and indebtedness – if persons still have enough credit on their credit card when purchasing items, if they pay their gas & electricity on time [often done through Alipay in China], pay violations tickets on time, etc. • (25%) general financial status/fulfillment capacity: the available amount on users’ Alipay account, if they are renting a car/house etc. and are able to pay for it, status of Huabei (a credit card function within the Alipay wallet), etc. • (20%) online behavior and preference: the extent to which an account is actively used, how many purchases are done, etc. • (15%) people’s personal characteristics: educational background, address, real-name registrations, etc. • (5%) contact network and interpersonal relationships: how many online contacts one has, ones’s influential power in contact list, interactions between user and friends, etc.

For those who opt in to Sesame Credit and have a high score, there are many different ways to benefit from it, as listed below.

The Top Ways to Benefit from Sesame Credit

Please note that there are more ways to benefit from a high Sesame Credit score, but we have listed five popular ones below.

#1 ‘Credit Treatment’ at Hospitals

In November of 2017, Sesame Credit first launched its “Credit Medical Treatment” (信用就医) services for people with a score over 650, with Shanghai’s Huashan hospital being the country’s first hospital to implement the function.

With “Credit Medical Treatment,” patients could save up to 60% of waiting time at hospitals by cutting lines and not needing to pay for treatments upfront. Payments are done through Sesame Credit’s in-app credit function Huabei (花呗).

While a normal procedure at Chinese hospitals can be time-consuming, the Sesame Credit procedure is much more efficient, mainly because people do not need to line up to pre-pay for their medical check-up and the medications.

Normal procedure:

(±20 min) 1. Arrive and register at the hospital and pay for it (±60 min) 2. Waiting time to see a doctor (±10 min) 3. Doctor’s appointment/consultation (±20 min) 4. Line up for payment [of examination] (±20 min) 5. Check-up/Examination (±20 min) 6. Queue up for payment (±10 min) 7. Pick up medicine

There are also other ways in which people with a good Sesame Credit score can enjoy extra services and benefits at hospitals. Those with a score over 600, for example, can rent a wheelchair in hospitals without deposit.

#2 Try First, Pay Later

Since September 2018, Sesame Credit offers the possibility to “try out” purchases from Tmall for consumers who have a Credit Score of over 700, promoting the idea of “never regretting a purchase.”

With this concept, people can order clothes or other items from e-commerce platform Tmall (天猫 Tiānmāo in Chinese) without any risk, having the guarantee to always being able to send back items that are unsatisfactory without paying for them.

There are also frequent promotions done by brands and companies in collaboration with Sesame Credit, such as offering people with a high credit score (over 750) to try out the newest Ford for three days, or to use the latest Meitu phone for 30 days for free, without necessarily needing to buy it afterward.

Meitu promotion for Sesame Credit users with a score over 750.

Sesame Credit also makes it more tempting for its users to spend money on (Alibaba) platforms in other ways. The higher one’s credit is, the more one is able to lend from online lending service Huabei; those with a credit higher than 750 can lend up to 20,000 RMB (±$2890). Unsurprisingly, the literal translation of Alipay’s ‘online credit card’ service Huabei (花呗) is “Just Spend.”

#3 No Deposit on Shared Bikes (and other things)

Sesame Credit has a partnership with bike sharing platforms Hello Bike (哈罗单车) and Ofo, allowing users with a credit over 650 points to rent these bicycles, that can be found anywhere in bigger cities in China, without paying a deposit.

It is not the only service that does not require a deposit for those with a high Credit score; using a shared umbrella, or a publicly available shared phone charger, or even renting apartments, often no longer needs a deposit for those with a higher score.

#4 Open Access to Libraries

In many places in China, people who have a Sesame Credit score over 550 no longer need to pay a downpayment and can set up a library card for free, in other places people with a higher Sesame score no longer need a library card at all to borrow books at their local libraries and/or their automated self-service street libraries (just their ID).

Since April of 2018, this special service for Sesame Credit users (not needing a card) was introduced in the entire Zhejiang province. Public libraries in other places, such as Shanghai, have already been experimenting with Sesame Credit perks for library lovers since 2015.

#5 Special Lounges at Train Stations

Especially during peak seasons such as the National Day holidays or Spring Festival, China’s train stations can get exceptionally busy. For Sesame Credit members with a score over 650, there are now special lounges to relax.

Sinanotes that the lounge is only available to those members who have also bought a higher fair ticket (first class), or who have a platinum status.